One of the ways that the ANS teaches students about numismatics is through student internships, where a student gets to learn about our work by participating in it. This semester, we have been lucky to have Kara Woodley from Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, working with our curatorial department.

Kara Woodley cataloguing a token.

Kara is a senior completing a double major in art history and history. For her two senior theses she is writing about Ireland during the struggle for independence in the early twentieth century. As part of her art history degree, she was required to complete an internship to gain practical experience. Prof. Megan Cifarelli suggested the ANS as a possibility that might be a good choice for a student with more interest in history than in the contemporary art scene.

Kara has worked on a few different tasks at the ANS, but the majority of her time has been devoted to entering our nineteenth-century Irish tokens into our curatorial database. Although these tokens have been acquired since the founding of the Society (some of them were donated in our first year, 1858!), hardly any of them had been entered into the computer yet.

ANS 1858.4.14

Armed with the standard references on the topic, Kara has been going through the tokens one by one, creating full database records for them. One of the tokens that she found interesting in relation to her academic research is a token or medalet commemorating Daniel O’Connell, an early nineteenth-century campaigner for Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the 1801 Act of Union. This piece is pierced for suspension, and the box has a note on the back saying that it was worn at an election meeting in 1865.

ANS 1932.999.1162.

Another piece she found interesting is a token issued by the banker William Hodgins in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary. This token is typically catalogued among Australian tokens, despite its reference to Ireland. Although originally produced for use in Ireland, large quantities of this token were apparently shipped to Australia, where they helped make up for a scarcity of official coinage.

ANS 0000.999.57452

During her internship Kara has been learning how museums work behind the scenes; in particular, about the processes involved in how a small staff manages a very large collection. She hopes this will be useful in her future career as an art historian, especially if she ends up working in a museum setting.

Next year Kara will be going to graduate school at Trinity College, Dublin, where she plans to specialize in Irish art of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Coins first appeared in the western world some 2,700 years ago. During most of this long history, coins were entirely handmade. The metals were excavated and smelted by hand; the coin blanks were manufactured by hand; the dies were engraved by hand; and the coins were struck by hand. Their use as monetary instruments required that coins be standardized, but because coins were handmade each individual coin differed in some way from all the others produced at roughly the same time: the alloys would differ from batch to batch depending on the metal sources; individual weights within a single batch would vary; dies would wear and be recut; or different obverse and reverse die combinations would be used. Of the billions of handmade coins produced over the centuries, only a very small proportion of them remain today. The detailed study of every existing coin thus helps us to piece together the bigger picture of a state’s fiscal and monetary policies, particularly the decisions made about how many coins to strike in a given year, in which denominations, and in which alloys. Detailed study also helps us to understand how mints operated as both government institutions and factories, how they developed organizational structures and production processes to meet demand.

For numismatists working on ancient Greek coinage particularly die studies of individual series remain the hallmark of our contributions to our overall understanding of ancient monetary systems. But to complete a die study, especially on larger issues, is a mind-numbingly difficult task, requiring not just the laborious and time-consuming gathering from a multitude of sources of images or casts of all known specimens, which can number in the thousands, but also the tedious and arduous task of comparing the images to find examples struck from the same die(s). The largest die study of ancient Greek coinage completed to date, Wolfgang Fischer-Bossert’s study of the didrachms of Tarentum included roughly 8,000 coins. This monumental undertaking cost Fischer-Bossert nearly a decade of his life and a good deal of his eyesight to complete. To try to tackle a die study the size of the late 5th c. Athenian “owl” coinage, of which ca. 60,000 coins probably exist today, would undoubtedly take a lifetime.

Overlays of three die-matched “owls” as identified by CADS.

It has long been recognized that developing a computer program to do much of the heavy lifting for die studies is something we all would readily welcome to help us speed smaller die studies along and to allow enormous die studies projects like that for late 5th c. Athenian owls to have a shot of actually being completed. The technology for such a program certainly exists today and a number of individuals in the numismatic community have been attempting to develop such a tool. At the ANS, our late colleague Richard (Rick) Witschonke took it upon himself to privately fund the development of what he called CADS: Computer Aided Die Study Program. During the last three years of his life (2013–2015), he worked closely with Huapeng Su to develop CADS, which he hoped to make a freely available, open source program to aid numismatic research. By the time Rick died in early 2015, CADS was functioning well with certain types of coinage, but still required further work to make it fully operational across a broad spectrum of numismatic material. It was Rick’s hope that the ANS would be able to find the funding to complete the work on CADS.

Happily, Prof. Josiah Ober of Stanford University has now stepped up, generously donating $10,000 of his research funds to the ANS to see a beta version of CADS released by the end of this year. Ober’s interest in this project stems from his attempts to find ways to quantify economic performance in the ancient Greek world, demonstrated, for example, in his most recent book The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton 2015) and in the launch of the POLIS website. What we can learn about the production and consumption of coinage has the potential to play a key role in gauging ancient economic performance, but only if we can generate quantifiable data through die studies and hoard studies. Currently, only about 15–20% of all possible die studies for ancient Greek coinage have been completed, meaning we still have a long way to go before we have significant and comparable data sets. It is our hope that with the launch of CADS, we can initiate a new era of numismatic studies, in which other digital tools like OCRE and PELLA can provide the assemblage of raw numismatic material for a series or type that a program like CADS will then use to produce die studies in a matter of hours rather than weeks, months, or even years.

On April 19, 2017, a new cultural institution, the Museum of the American Revolution, will open in downtown Philadelphia. It will present relics of the Revolutionary War to the public as a way of telling the dramatic story of the nation’s founding. For their inaugural exhibition the Museum of the American Revolution requested the loan of 12 eighteenth-century medals from the ANS. Several Colonial-period Indian peace medals are included in this loan. These medals were issued as tokens of friendship to members of Native American nations to gain their support and allegiance. This group includes two of the earliest Indian peace medals known: a British bronze medal with the image of George I (1714–1727) and a Native American hunting a deer with bow and arrow (fig.1), and a French silver medal with a bust of Louis XV (1715–1774) on the obverse, signed by Jean Duvivier, and a reverse depicting two warriors reaching out and clasping hands, the man on the right representing France, with the other representing the Indian allies of France (fig.2).

Another remarkable medal in this group was issued at the time of Pontiac’s Revolt in 1763, a conflict named after the Ottawa chief who led the Indians of the Great Lakes region against British rule after end of the Seven Years’ War resulted in the transfer of claimed sovereignty over their lands from the French to the British. The obverse of this medal shows an armored George III with a legend containing his usual titles. The reverse depicts an American Indian and a uniformed British officer seated on bench under tree, smoking a pipe of peace (fig.4).

These early Indian peace medals carry immense historical importance both as landmarks in American colonial history and as symbols of the importance that the colonial powers placed on building alliances with the Native Americans. This portion of the exhibition explores the consequences of Anglo-American victory in the Seven Years’ War for the diverse peoples of North America, including former French and Spanish colonists living in the newly expanded British dominions and Native American nations of the Great Lakes and trans-Appalachian West.

Also among the ANS items on loan to the Museum of the American Revolution is a group of Admiral Vernon medals (figs. 5–6), exhibited in a gallery that introduces visitors to the Anglo-American sense of shared glory in all things British during the French and Indian Wars. These medals were issued in celebration of Admiral Vernon’s campaigns in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. On November 21, 1739, Admiral Vernon attacked the harbor of Portobelo in what is now Panama with six ships. After brief resistance the Spanish garrison surrendered. The British force destroyed the harbor fortifications before they left and returned to their base in Jamaica. Vernon then assembled a larger expeditionary force for an attack on Cartagena in what is now Colombia (fig.7).

Fig. 7: Great Britain. Bronze medal commemorating the siege of Cartagena, 1741. Ironically, although the siege was a costly failure for the British, this medal imagines the Spanish commander, Don Blas de Lezo (1689–1741), kneeling and handing his sword to Admiral Vernon. (ANS 0000.999.38214) 37.6 mm.

When this fleet set sail in 1741 Admiral Vernon was commander of more than 50 warships, with 12,000 soldiers from England and the American colonies, many of whom died of disease during the futile campaign. Among the American survivors was Captain Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George Washington, who went on to name his home Mount Vernon after Admiral Vernon.

Today is Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter), which for Christians signifies the day on which Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (John 13:1–17) while instructing them to love one another (John 13:34). It is also the day of the Last Supper.

Maundy Thursday also has numismatic significance by way of the Royal Maundy, a religious service in the Church of England. Current practice holds that the Queen (or a royal official) gives out two purses of coins to elderly recipients as symbolic alms. A red purse holds money for the poor to buy food and clothing, while a white purse contains the special Maundy money. Recipients in the contemporary service are chosen based on their service to their communities around England. This tradition of the distribution of alms in England by a monarch dates back to the reign of King John (r. 1199–1216) who in 1213 gave 13 pence each to 13 poor men in Rochester, Kent in a Maundy ceremony.

In the early tradition of Maundy money, the coins used were circulated and not marked as Maundy alms. This changed in 1752 when the Royal Mint began to produce specialized sets of Maundy money based on coins not struck for circulation. These sets included one silver coin each in denominations of 1d, 2d, 3d, and 4d. The obverses sport the bust of the reigning monarch, and the reverses (since 1822) feature the denomination topped by a crown and encircled by an oak wreath.

There are 430 specimens of Maundy money in the ANS’s collection, one of which is illustrated in MANTIS (pictured above). This 4d silver groat, minted in London between 1660 and 1662 under the authority of Charles II, was traditionally called a “Maundy piece,” this coin exemplifying the Simon issue of 1660–1662. In actuality, this coin was part of a mintage for circulation.

According to the Royal Mint, “Maundy money as such started in the reign of Charles II with an undated issue of hammered coins in 1662. The coins were a four penny, three penny, two penny and one penny piece but it was not until 1670 that a dated set of all four coins appeared. Prior to this, ordinary coinage was used for Maundy gifts, silver pennies alone being used by the Tudors and Stuarts for the ceremony.”

The digitization of the American Numismatic Society’s backlist of monographs has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the joint NEH-Mellon Humanities Open Book Program. All of the ANS’s book-length publications through 2010 will be made available for free online for anyone to use. The ANS is one of the United States’ oldest academic publishers, producing printed scholarship since 1866, pre-dating storied university presses such as Johns Hopkins University (1878), the University of Pennsylvania (1890), and the University of Chicago (1891). The ANS continues to lead the way with digital scholarly publications, something it could not have done without the support of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This is the second year the ANS has received Mellon funding for the project, and will conclude the work begun in 2016. In 2016, the Humanities Open Book Program selected 10 academic publishers to convert their out-of-print books of enduring scholarship into EPUB e-books licensed to allow readers to search and download these books freely, and to read them on any type of e-reader. In 2017, eight grants were awarded.

As in 2016, the ANS will convert its remaining scanned books into TEI XML, which will allow for instant generation of e-books as well as internet-friendly text that both contains and encourages links to other content online: related people, places, and events.

“Numismatics is uniquely placed in between history, archaeology, economics, art history, geography, and other disciplines,” Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications for the ANS said. “By encoding these books and making them available as Open Access, scholars and hobbyists alike can exploit the true interdisciplinary nature of numismatic data for their own work, finding content and making connections that would otherwise be hidden.”

“Academic and non-academic researchers increasingly use the Internet as a source of information and a vehicle for disseminating the results of their work,” said Earl Lewis, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Today, more than ever, scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public need access on the Internet to reliable and authoritative works that were previously published but are now out-of-print. The Humanities Open Book initiative seeks to help provide that much-needed access.”

The grant covers the encoding and tagging of the remaining 127 ANS monographs from three series: Numismatic Studies (3 titles), Coinage of the Americas (3 titles), and Numismatic Notes and Monographs (121 titles). At the conclusion of the grant period, the ANS will continue to make its TEI XML-encoded books available for free online one year after publication of new scholarship.

The second batch of Mellon-funded EPUB and TEI-encoded publications will be available by June 2018. The ANS thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its continued support, and the Mellon Foundation and NEH for their enthusiasm and commitment to making the Humanities available to everyone. With the NEH’s funding and very mandate under threat, the ANS encourages its US-based members and researchers to contact their elected senators and representatives to remind them that the Humanities are what makes us human.

On April 3–4, the Oxford Paris Alexander Project (OPAL) hosted a conference at New College, at the University of Oxford in England, entitled “A Linked Open World: Alexander the Great, Transnational Heritage and the Semantic Web.” Established by Frédérique Duyrat, Director of the Coin Cabinet at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), and Andrew Meadows, Professor of Ancient History at New College, and funded by LABEX Les Passés dans le Présent and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, OPAL is designed to supplement and enhance the ANS-based PELLA project with additional data and an interpretative framework. “Additional data,” in this case, has been the concerted efforts by Simon Glenn at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and Caroline Carrier at the BnF to catalogue the thousands of Alexander-type coinages held by those two institutions in order that the individual coin records and photographs may then be linked to the PELLA website. Thanks to their efforts, PELLA now contains records of nearly 19,000 coins. The “interpretive framework” portion of OPAL includes the New College conference.

OPAL’s home in April, New College, University of Oxford.

The aim of the conference was to examine how the digital collection of data through the semantic web can assist in identifying, collecting, interpreting and preserving transnational heritage. With its focus on the coinage and empire of Alexander the Great, the conference organizers were particularly concerned first to investigate how the accumulation of data can help us to write the history of an Imperial economic space. They aimed to do this through some carefully chosen case studies and the broad analysis of statistical data provided by the PELLA project. The second part explored the role of Alexander’s coinage as a bridge between different cultures and different periods, with a particular interest in the question of the preservation of global cultural heritage in a transnational environment.

Ethan Gruber, ANS Director of Data Science, presents at OPAL.

Speakers from the ANS included Director of Data Science Ethan Gruber and Research Scientist Sebastian Heath, who both addressed the technical side of ANS-based digital projects like PELLA and the sematic web, that is the intensive and deliberate interlinking of different types of knowledge on the web, including, for example, numismatic, geographical and biographical data within a single website like PELLA. Also from the ANS was Peter van Alfen, who presented one of the historical case studies. A print volume of the conference proceedings is planned to appear in early 2018, published by Ausonius Éditions, the chapters of which will probably adhere closely to the conference program:

The “French Quartet” (l. to r.) of Frédérique Duyrat, Julien Olivier, Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, and Caroline Carrier, present their metallurgical study of a section of Alexander the Great’s coinage.

Part 1: New Tools

Equality and Concept: Broadening the Scope of Linked Open Data (Sebastian Heath)

ANS Digital Projects: A Comprehensive Platform for the Study of Numismatics (Ethan Gruber)

Statistical Exploration of PELLA Data (Julien Olivier)

OPAL conference lunch in New College, Oxford.

Part 2: Imperial Economic Space—Using PELLA to Write a New History

What is an Alexander? (Andrew Meadows)

The Destruction and Recreation of Monetary Zones in the Wake of Alexander’s Conquests (Peter van Alfen)

The Impact of Alexander’s Conquest on Minted Silver: New Data from Metallurgical Analysis of Coins Kept at the BnF (Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, Julien Olivier, Caroline Carrier)

The First Generation of Alexander’s Influence: Diversity of Empire (Karsten Dahmen)

Alexander Gold Coinage throughout the Empire and Beyond (Frédérique Duyrat)

OPAL speakers Simon Glenn (l.) and Pierre Briant (r.).

Part 3: Cultural Interaction and Legacy

The Coinage of Alexander the Great as Perceived during the 16th–18th Centuries (François de Callataÿ)

The Legacy of Alexander: Money in Central Asia (Simon Glenn)

Looting and its Impact: The Case of Alexanders from the Near East and the Role of an Online Corpus Project (Caroline Carrier & Simon Glenn)

The Debate about the Spread of Alexander’s Coinage and its Economic Impact: Engaging with the Historiographical Longue Durée (Pierre Briant)

Conclusion: Alexander: The Wider Vision (Robin Lane Fox)

OPAL keynote speaker, Robin Lane Fox.

The conference proved to be quite a success, illustrating just how the development of digital tools like PELLA can have a transformative effect on how we interpret existing evidence from the ancient world, on how we approach other interpretations of this same evidence from across the ages, and on the way in which we preserve this entire heritage. In addition to the enlightening papers and conversations, participants were also treated to an after-hours reception at the Ashmolean Museum to view a special exhibition on Alexander’s coinage curated by Simon Glenn, as well as a guided tour of the New College gardens, in full spring bloom, by the eminent historian and Financial Times gardening columnist, Robin Lane Fox.

Alexander the Great: Coinage from a Common Past exhibit display at the Ashmolean Museum, on view until April 23, 2017.

The lecture will be followed by a response from Finbarr Barry Flood, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University.

The Harry W. Fowler Memorial Lecture was established in 1998 with a bequest from Mr. Fowler and with additional gifts from the Fowler family. Harry W. Fowler served as President of the American Numismatic Society from 1984–1990, and for his personal generosity was named a Benefactor of the Society in 1986. In 1995 he bequeathed his collection of Bactrian coins to the ANS, which together with the Society’s already strong holdings, has created one of the most comprehensive collections of Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins.

We are thrilled to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the American Numismatic Society (ANS) a substantial grant of $262,000 to fund the web-based Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC) project. Under the direction of Curator Dr. Peter van Alfen and Director of Data Science Ethan Gruber, this three-year project (Phase 1, planned for 2017–­2020) promises to radically transform the ability of students, scholars, or collectors to identify and research Hellenistic royal coinages, and to incorporate this numismatic material into broad analyses of political, economic, and social history. The funds from this grant will be used solely to hire assistants to aid in the extensive photography, cataloguing, and typology work that lies at the heart of the project.

The Background: Hellenistic Royal Coinages

Coins are an entirely unique type of evidence for the ancient world. No other class of artifact embodies the same mixture of political, social, artistic and economic concerns. The product of politicized decision making, ancient coins entered the world through state payments, but then became instruments of economic exchange more broadly, sometimes with serious and far­reaching social consequences. The numbers that survive today tell us about the size of economies at a given moment and in particular places; their images and inscriptions tell us about the self­perceptions of rulers or entire societies; their find­spots help us map the extent of political powers and economic influence. Ancient coins are a great deal more than just dead currency.

Within a few centuries of their invention in the seventh century BCE, coins became preferred monetary instruments, but their use was mostly limited to the Greek world. This was to change dramatically following the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great at the end of the fourth century BCE. A sudden and massive surge in coin production began using the thousands of tons of captured Persian gold and silver in areas of the Near East that had previously not seen coinage, first under Alexander himself and later under his successors (Figs. 1–2).

The monetary consequences of this flood of new coinage and monetary metal were unparalleled, not just in the East, but in the Greek homelands as well, where many city­-states stopped producing their own coins or began to produce imitations of Alexander’s coinage. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, his successors, including Seleucus, Ptolemy, and Antigonus began to define their individual kingdoms and soon initiated a new royal class of coinage that stood well apart from the traditional city-­state issues. Taking cues from Alexander’s coins, these royal coinages were distinctive in a number of ways, not least for the ruler portraits that appeared on coins for the first time in history. Today, these remarkable coins bear some of the most distinctive images to survive from the ancient world, and form a standard part of many museum collections (Figs. 3–5).

In a period from which few contemporary historical accounts survive, royal Hellenistic coinages have the potential to provide critical insights into the rise and fall of powerful dynasties in the Mediterranean and Near East between c. 323 and 30 BCE. They can inform us about large scale conflicts, the movement of vast amounts of wealth across regions, as well as the transfer of wealth between social classes. But coinage can only be set to these tasks if it can be assembled in large quantities. With the arrival of web­-based tools for such assemblage, we are presented with the opportunity to bring together large amounts of evidence distributed across multiple collections, and thus to transform our understanding of an entire period of history.

Hellenistic Numismatic Evidence: Problems and Solutions

Hundreds of millions of royal coins were originally produced, hundreds of thousands exist today, and tens of thousands reside in single collections like that of the ANS, which alone holds 25,740 examples. Major collections are held in museums across the United States, as well as in the large national collections in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere. Like the ANS with its online catalogue MANTIS, most of these institutions provide web-­based access to many of the royal coins in their collections. But despite this wealth of numismatic evidence available for research, the study of royal coinage is severely hampered by several problems:

1) Typologies and cataloguing. The coinages of Alexander the Great, the Seleucid kings of Syria, and the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt have been well studied and typologies have been published in print, but those for Lysimachus of Thrace, the Antigonids of Macedonia, the Attalids of Pergamum, and the Bactrian kings of Central Asia still have not been. Of the existing typological studies, some now are long out of print while the more recent studies, in print or not, are prohibitively expensive thus restricting access for many researchers, whether students, scholars, or collectors. Equally problematic is the fact that even the more recent type catalogues have now been made obsolete by new finds and revised attributions. As a result, there has been little alignment of the cataloguing in different collections making it exceedingly difficult to compare types of coins or to identify new ones across collections or even within a single collection. This global lack of alignment is not only an impediment to research, but to collection curation and in­field archaeological work as well, which often depends on comparative examples for determining attributions and dating of individual specimens. It is now quite obvious that printed books can no longer serve as the ideal medium for the publication of critical numismatic typologies, which need to be widely and openly accessible and easily updatable:

2) Monograms and symbols. Hellenistic royal coins are remarkably “chatty”; the reverses of the coins typically carry not just the name of the king, but also numerous additional monograms and symbols (Fig. 6). These are not well understood. Some we know indicate the place (the “mint”) where the coin was produced; others may indicate additional administrative information, such as the sub­authority (a “magistrate”) directly responsible for the coinage. These marks are often our sole clue for deducing where and when a coin was struck. To date there has been no attempt to collate the thousands of marks known from the individual series of royal coins into a universal, searchable repository. Such a tool would immediately allow connections to be made between, for example, different series of Seleucid coins, but also between Seleucid and other non­Seleucid coinages. This would further allow deductions about attributions and dating to be verified or corrected, and would give insight into the extent to which the marks were reused across time and space, which would help to resolve the purpose of some marks.

3) Access to provenance information, find-spots information, and archival resources. One of the most important and prolific scholars of royal coinage, Edward T. Newell (d. 1941), left to the ANS dozens of notebooks and unpublished manuscripts on royal coinages and hoards that remain highly relevant. Until recently access to these documents had been limited to visitors to the ANS. At the same time, files at the ANS containing notes, correspondence and photographs concerning hundreds of hoards of Hellenistic coins remain inaccessible to most researchers. These files form the basis for the terse descriptions of hoards found in the publications Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (1973) and Coin Hoards I­X (1975–2010), detailing the find-spots both for types of coins and for individual specimens. Open access to these archival resources would give researchers a better understanding of the circulation patterns of individual types of coins, and the provenance history of individual specimens.

Hellenistic Royal Coinage aims to provide a solution to all of these problems. Through the digitization of the ANS’s unrivalled collection of this material, in parallel with the conversion of existing print works to a Linked Open Data resource, it will offer a suite of open access online tools that will provide benchmark typologies for royal coinages beginning with those of Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and the Ptolemies. In addition, it will provide a linkable and searchable repository of monograms and symbols, extensive information on findspots (hoards), and will provide full and interlinked access to critical archival resources held at the ANS.

Overview of HRC

HRC will be built around seven interlinked components, employing the principles of Linked Open Data, already successfully deployed in a number of other ANS projects (including the NEH-­funded Online Coins of the Roman Empire). These include three stand­alone online tools each of which is devoted to the coinage of a single royal dynasty. These are: (1) PELLA, with a focus on the Argeads of Macedonia including Alexander the Great; (2) Seleucid Coins Online (SCO); and (3) Ptolemaic Coins Online (PCO). Incorporated within these three tools will be (4) a monogram and symbols repository. Two additional stand­alone tools, (5) Greek Coin Hoards and (6) the scanned Newell notebooks, will provide full documentation of available hoard evidence and provenance information for many individual coins. While all of the stand­alone tools will be interlinked, they will also be united through a portal site, (7) Hellenistic Royal Coinages, that will serve as a union catalogue for global searches and as a platform for later expansion, which will focus on adding the coinages of the remaining Hellenistic dynasties (Phase 2, post­-2020).

Portions of Phase 1 have, in fact, already been completed. Early versions of three out of the seven components of HRC were launched by the ANS in 2015:

1) PELLA, launched in September 2015, has as its initial focus the voluminous coinages of Alexander (III) the Great, his immediate successor Philip III Arrhidaeus, and those produced posthumously in their names. Later versions of PELLA will incorporate the earlier Argead kings from Alexander I to Philip II. The basic concept of PELLA, like that of SCO and PCO, is to establish stable URIs for each known variety of Alexander’s coinage and then to provide a highly functional tool for identifying individual types of coins within a larger dynastic series, to provide illustrations, information, and statistical analyses on as many examples of the individual types as possible, and to provide as much information as possible on hoards containing examples of the individual types. The typology of the current version of PELLA (v.1) is based on that of Martin Price’s Coinage in the Name of Alexander the Great and Philip Arrhidaeus (British Museum 1991).

A typical page on the PELLA website, that for Price type 4 for example, provides: (1) a typological description (with links to the Nomisma.org thesaurus); (2) a map of hoard finds (with links to the relevant coin hoard page; see below); (3) links to and illustrations of 47 examples of Price type 4 found in the collections of the ANS and Bode Museum in Berlin; and (4) statistical analyses of the weights and die axes of these 47 coins. All told, the current version of PELLA catalogues 4,070 separate types of coinage with links to 18,676 individual examples from thirteen institutions located in the US, England, France, and Germany; by the end of 2017, thousands of more additional examples will be added from collections in the US, France, and England. Continued development of PELLA has become a collaborative, international initiative, not just in order to add more examples of individual types, but to edit and revise as well. Since Price’s 1991 typology is in need of extensive revision due to advances in scholarship over the last 25 years, a consortium of nearly a dozen researchers based in the US, England and France, is currently working to revise the typology, which will appear in PELLA v.2, planned for late 2017. PELLA will then serve as the model for SCO and PCO, both in terms of functionality and development. With initial development work spearheaded by the ANS, others elsewhere will contribute to and facilitate further development of these tools.

2) In February 2015, the ANS launched a beta version of the Greek Coin Hoards website based on the 1973 ANS co-­publication Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH ), which lists and provides basic descriptions of 2,387 hoards, the majority of which date from the Hellenistic period. The current version (v.1) feeds hoard find-spot information to PELLA, and allows for rudimentary searches of hoard information. Further development of the tool is necessary, however, to achieve its full potential. This will include the incorporation of data from an additional c. 2,400 hoards derived from the print publications Coin Hoards (vols. I­X), links to the catalogue records of coins found in individual hoards currently held in public collections, links to bibliography on the individual hoards, and, most importantly, the incorporation of the unpublished archival material held at the ANS on individual hoards. Development of coinhoards.org has been funded to date by the ANS and Stanford University.

3) The ANS maintains an online archives website, ARCHER. With a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the ANS digitized more than 3,500 pages in 43 notebooks of Edward T. Newell for addition to ARCHER in 2015 (Fig. 7). This was done in such a way as to allow interlinking between the digital notebooks, the ANS’s online numismatic catalogue (MANTIS), and online library catalogue (DONUM). Thus, if a coin mentioned in the notebooks currently belongs to the ANS, readers are directed to that coin’s record in MANTIS; if that coin had been published by Newell, readers are directed to the DONUM record for that publication; and if Newell discusses a hoard listed in IGCH, readers are directed to the relevant coinhoards.org page. To date, roughly 15% of the groundwork for this cross-­linking between the notebooks and other ANS catalogues has been completed. A great deal more work remains to complete this as well as to link the monograms and symbols noted by Newell to the planned repository for these marks.

The major work that remains for Phase 1 of HRC is then twofold: (1) adding functionality to existing tools; and (2) building new tools. Once completed, Phase 1 of HRC will have a transformative effect on our approach to this important body of material. In a matter of seconds, anyone from anywhere there is an internet connection will be able to gather a wealth of critical information on royal coinages for a variety of purposes, whether for academic research, museum cataloguing, or just general interest.

We thank the NEH for their generous support of this project. We also ask that should you have the desire to do so, please be vocal in your support of this important funding agency for the humanities at this critical juncture in its 50-year history.

The American Numismatic Society is proud to announce the arrival of the American Journal of Numismatics, Vol. 28. Subscribers will receive their copies the week of March 6, 2017. This volume contains 271 pages, 60 b/w plates, and seven articles, plus a book review:

The ANS curators and fellows are pleased to announce a new lecture series, “Money Talks: Numismatic Conversations.” In this monthly interactive lecture series, appropriate for all levels of coin collectors and enthusiasts, attendees will view relevant coins, banknotes, or medals while learning about the broader world of numismatics. Light meals will be served, and Q&A sessions will follow. To ensure these events are as accessible as possible to all, most will take place on Saturdays at the ANS headquarters in New York City. On a few occasions, these Numismatic Conversations will take place at other venues.

During Saturday Numismatic Conversations at the ANS, the Society will be open from 12:00 noon to 4:00 pm, so you have the opportunity to view items in our collections or library.

When taking place at the ANS, the fee will be $20 for ANS members, $50 for non-members. Pricing for other venues will be determined.

The series kicked off at the ANS on February 11 with lectures by Peter van Alfen, Gilles Bransbourg, and Ute Wartenberg on “The Origins of Money.” This lecture considered the beginnings of money and its various guises including cut silver in the ancient Near East, early electrum coinage of Asia Minor, early bronze objects, bars and heavy coins in Italy and the spread of cowries in the Indian Ocean area, Eastern Africa and South Asia, including China.

Next Lecture: March 11

The next lecture in the series will be on Saturday, March 11, at the ANS at 1:00 pm, by Vivek Gupta, “The Beginnings of Islamic Coinage.” This talk will introduce members to the beginnings of Islamic coinage in the seventh century and its vast trajectories within the Arab lands and beyond. It will begin with an in-depth survey of its Byzantine and Sasanian precedents and will provide a basic outline of “Arab-Sasanian” and “Arab-Byzantine” types. Members will also learn about the styles of Arabic calligraphy that were used on early Islamic coins. Members will be able to view and handle fine examples of the ANS’s Islamic holdings with Assistant Curator, Vivek Gupta.

Lunch will be served at 1:00 pm, followed by the lecture at 2:00 pm, and Q&A at 3:00 pm. The ANS will remain open from 12 noon until 4:00 pm. RSVP: Catherine DiTuri, (212) 571-4470 #117

Highlights of upcoming lectures (full brochure to follow):

Saturday, May 6

Gilles Bransbourg, “Signs of Inflation.”

Dr. Bransbourg will look at how inflation translates into coinage debasement and banknotes bearing large denominations, from ancient Rome to modern Zimbabwe.

Saturday, May 6, 2017, at 1:00 pm. American Numismatic Society. Lunch served at 1:00 pm, followed by the lecture at 2:00 pm, Q&A at 3:00 pm. The ANS will remain open from 12 noon until 4:00 pm.

David Hendin, “Ancient Jewish Coinage.”

Mr. Hendin will discuss the origins and production of ancient Jewish Coinage from the Persian era until the time of the revolts against Rome.

Date: TBA. Venue: American Numismatic Society.

Alan Roche, “The Art of Photographing Coins.”

Mr. Roche will consider the various aspects involved in the production of high resolution images of coins and banknotes. A hands-on photographic demonstration will be included.

Date: TBA. American Numismatic Society.

Mark Tomasko, “Representations on US Banknotes.”

Date: TBA. American Numismatic Society.

Jonathan Kagan, “Numismatic Book Collecting.”

Mr. Kagan will talk on collecting early books, particularly those with a focus on numismatics.

Date: TBA. Venue: American Numismatic Society.

Speakers: TBA “Wine and Money.”

In this lecture we will consider the strong relationships between coinage, banknotes, and wine throughout history and cultures.

Date and Venue: TBA.

Please mark your calendars and plan on joining us for these informal programs in a relaxed and social environment.